Many challenging wireless network management issues arise with regard to the allocation of two available resource groups. For example, the component carrier (CC) assignment problem in a carrier aggregated network, the resource partition (RP) assignment problem in an interference coordinated network, and the handoff (or cell association) decision problem all typically involve the partitioning or allocation of two resource groups. The definition of a resource group depends upon the network circumstances—for example, a resource group may be a single component carrier (or a set of CCs) in the component carrier assignment problem, or a single resource partition (or a set of RPs) in the resource partition assignment problem, or the radio resource of a single cell in the handoff decision problem.
Regardless of the particular type of resource group being allocated, the allocation depends upon the goals of the network designer. For example, one can design a network so that system capacity is maximized. In that regard, suppose a high quality resource group is being allocated along with a low quality resource group. If there is single wireless terminal in a cell, a trivial solution to allocation is to let the wireless terminal use both resource groups. If there is more than one user, the problem is no longer trivial due to the conflict between system capacity and fairness. For example, the radio quality for a terminal in the cell core is likely better than that for a terminal in the cell edge. Assigning both the high and low quality resource group to the cell core terminal, therefore, maximizes the system capacity. But such a solution makes maximizes unfairness because the edge terminal is not provided with any resource. Conversely, the network designer may stress fairness over system capacity. In such a scenario, one could evenly distribute the high quality and low quality resource groups to all terminals in the cell. If the resource groups are component carriers, however, the power consumption caused by turning on multiple CCs should be avoided (especially for the battery-powered terminals) as much as possible. Moreover, channel feedback and scheduling overhead accompanied by multiple CCs (or RPs) grows as the number of wireless terminals increases. Thus, system capacity would be significantly degraded in a totally fair design.
One can thus readily appreciate that it is a non-trivial problem to balance the competing needs of system capacity and fairness simultaneously. Thus there is a need in the art for improved resource group allocation techniques.